In prospect, this sounds like it might be a terribly sexy post. I regret to inform you, alas, that this will actually involve a bit of my conventional noodling and navel-gazing, though I hope the result is of some value.

As I’ve surely established by now, I have a deep and abiding fetish for metacognition. I love me some thinking about thinking. Today, at least, I’m thinking about generative, positive, and even optimistic thinking, which is not my usual wheelhouse.

Long ago I remarked on the comfort I take in focusing my thought and behavior on what actually falls to me, personally, as a critter. I think about that ethos quite a bit at the end of a semester, since I will spend several days reaching out to and awaiting response from students who need a little nudge to remember something they’ve forgotten. Most of the time I dread The Day After, since that’s often the day when those students finally open up their email or else realize (with their final grades in hand) that they could have changed outcomes to some extent. It’s a sort of worry I’m prone to, though it does me no good. I try not to think of myself as a worrier, but by golly, I’m one of those worriers.

Worry, as it turns out, is a pretty simple imaginative expedition. Because I have a fair amount of experience with stuff going badly in the past, it’s not too tough to imagine other things might go the same way. It’s thought on easy mode, though it’s not easy on the old noggin. It doesn’t require much self-discipline to lapse into a default mode when doing otherwise requires energy and what can be a significant expenditure of cognitive energy.

I am pleased to report, however, that it’s possible. It just requires a lot of revision, both the American and British senses of the word.

For example, early this year I fainted and took a spill. As with most such occurrences, I was bewildered and really didn’t know what had happened. I wound up with a smashed toe and a respectable bonk on the head, and a subsequent visit to my primary-care doctor concluded that a smashening and a bonkening were about the extent of it. He sent me in for some blood work as well, though it turned up nothing actionable. The good/bad follow-up news is that I had a full-blown episode of syncope (which is the fancy name I prefer) a month later, sitting down and playing a Rainy City game on Friday night with my friends.

It’s super-easy to focus on the mediocrity of my doctor, the crunchiness of my toe, the cavalcade of tests that annoyed me for all of March and April, etc. It’s harder but wiser to accentuate the positive instead, which requires a more significant reconfiguration of my habits of mind. For example, the two episodes yielded relatively injury, which tends to be the most significant side effect of the whole business. Better still, the process of diagnosis yielded a benign outcome and an excellent new cardiologist. I went into my follow-up meeting with him to analyze my test results, though they seemed to me conclusive, and he sent me back into the wild with solid recommendations and answers to all my questions about managing the whole deal.

The trick is to recall that mode of conceiving of things and to persist in it, to keep redirecting my noggin whenever is starts heading down Dejection Street. With the new cardiologist’s advice in my pocket I returned to the gym this week, for example, and I was disheartened for a bit by the retirement of the old stair climber I’ve used most every summer. I freely concede it was old and due to be sent to the auction block, but it was still a bit of a letdown. But I can still go to the gym without restriction–save to be mindful of all the run-up symptoms that prefigure a spill. I normally focus on losing weight over the summer, but I can always work on building muscle instead. And I’ve got a pretty open summer in which to work it all out, with exercise in the morning and writing in the afternoons. It’s an enviable schedule, though my mind is natively wired to think about how much printing and shipping hard copies of Chancers is going to cost, about how I’m going to fill in the last few blanks I’ve got in the artwork column, etc. When my brain sets out in those directions, it generally takes an act of will to turn down a side corridor or to turn entirely around.

I think it’s something of a byproduct of our doomscrolling debauchery, since its easy to get caught up in the latest revolution in sociopolitical strangeness and dwell on it all the livelong day. But going against the grain of that tendency can feel a lot like optimism. A good example occurred last evening, when a scene in a show I was watching put me in mind of some new sociopolitical thing I’d encountered earlier in the day. Rather than revisiting it and fretting about it, however, I instead asked myself why I ought to bother and then spent fifteen minutes or so challenging my own penchant for such nonsense. I’m plenty informed, so the need to gather more info about some troublesome subject is small, and in a rare turn I managed to talk myself out of a deep dive into arbitrary woe. I won’t say I’ve logged enough practice to do it on a regular basis, but I can say I’m getting into the habit of practicing. And that, when you’re as well-versed in the ways of woe as I generally am, is a heckuva thing to carry into the summer months.

A 5/17 addendum:

A decent case in point: a storm rolled through late on the 15th, and we lost electricity in our neighborhood thanks to a power line downed by a fallen tree. When all is said and done we probably tossed out about $250 in groceries this morning. But they’ll be easy enough to replace, none of the trees I fret about fell, the outage aftermath chanced to fall on a day that was mild, weatherwise, and most of the perplexities we faced took about an hour to remedy. I am in point of fact terribly stressed by disruption, but it’s easy enough to round the corner from such episodes when you look at them rightly.